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Topic: DXO Photolab suggestions after one month of working with it (Read 1881 times)

I've been a long time user of Lightroom and after releasing DXO Photolab I decided to give it a try and process the entire set of photos from my last holiday just with this tool. I have to admit that I am more than impressed with the capabilities, user experience and results. Nevertheless, there are some things (often very trivial to do) that could be improved and move the product even further ahead.

1/ I am missing black&white masks for various adjustments, most importantly the local ones. For instance for U-points I would be really interested in seeing the mask of actual pixels being selected with corresponding level of shade.

2/ When moving sliders for blacks, shadows, ... it would be very nice to have histogram being updated realtime.

3/ The tone curve could display histogram in it as is the case for almost every software out there. Among others it helps quickly adjust black and white points

4/ When exporting an image into another application (affinity photo in my case) the thumbnail of the exported image does not get updated. I understand DXO cannot read all the images all the time and update thumbnails but at least some manual refresh button would help.

5/ There is no way to see history of updates you have done, you can return only by one step at time. This is quite painful when you need to undo higher number of updates.

6/ When exporting images it does not give a default option what to do for images which were already exported with same same. I always pick up 'Use unique names' but have to do it every single time I export.

7/ When applying microcontrast from global adjustments it would be nice to setup kind of a mask based on focus level. E.g. I almost never want to apply microcontrast to out of focus areas. The only current option I have is to use local adjustments. This selection of pixels to be impacted would work great if it showed you a B&W mask for pixels being affected.

5/ There is no way to see history of updates you have done, you can return only by one step at time. This is quite painful when you need to undo higher number of updates.

There is a very handy feature that I use systematically: virtual copies. You can create any number and therefore apply different treatment to each.When I start working in a folder of new pics my first move is to select them all and create virtual copies. I’ll always keep untouched the #1 as a reference for the original state and work only on copies. If I want to have or to test different corrections I’ll do them on different copies only. I can destroy any of them. The cost is a few tens of KB in the sidecar .dop file, peanuts.

6/ When exporting images it does not give a default option what to do for images which were already exported with same same. I always pick up 'Use unique names' but have to do it every single time I export.

I suppose you want to export different versions of the same picture to the same folder. I suggest you use the virtual copies feature because DPL adds the copy number as a suffix so if your different versions are in different copies there will be no conflict.